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Everything you need to know about the Facebook and Instagram outage happening now

The Facebook app icon on an iPhone home screen, with other app icons surrounding it.
Brett Johnson / Unsplash

If you’re having difficulty using Facebook and Instagram this morning, we have some news: you aren’t alone. As of Tuesday, March 5, both of the Meta-owned social media websites are experiencing outages, rendering many people unable to use them. This comes shortly after AT&T experienced a nationwide outage of its own.

When did this Facebook/Instagram outage start? Are any other websites down? When do we expect it to be fixed? Here’s everything we know.

When did the Facebook and Instagram outage start?

Looking at Down Detector, reports of Facebook and Instagram being down first started coming in a little before 10:30 a.m. ET. Reports spiked around 10:24 a.m., with over 500,000 outage reports coming in at that time.

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Instagram outage reports saw a similar spike, with over 77,000 outage reports coming into Down Detector around the same time.

What’s wrong? Users are reporting that they’ve been logged out of Facebook with no ability to log back into their accounts. As for Instagram, we’ve seen reports of people’s feeds not refreshing to show new posts.

Looking at the Meta Status website, this also confirms ongoing issues. In addition to “major disruptions” reported for Facebook Login, Meta has also identified issues with its Meta Admin Center, WhatsApp Business API, and Marketing API. In short, a lot of stuff is broken.

Where is the Facebook and Instagram outage happening?

The Facebook and Instagram outages appear to be affecting people all over the United States. Down Detector shows reports in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Minneapolis, throughout Florida, Michigan, New York, etc.

If you live in the U.S., chances are you’re affected.

When will the Facebook and Instagram outage be fixed?

As of right now, it’s unclear when the Facebook and Instagram outage will be fixed. Meta is clearly aware of the issue, but we don’t currently have an ETA for when everything will be back to normal.

We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.

— Andy Stone (@andymstone) March 5, 2024

Andy Stone, who works on the Communications team at Meta, posted on X at 10:52 a.m. ET that the Meta team is “aware people are having trouble accessing our services” and that Meta is “working on this now.”

Are other websites down?

Although Facebook and Instagram are experiencing the most issues, they aren’t the only websites with increased outage reports this morning. Down Detector also shows increased outage reports for YouTube, Google Play, Threads, X (formerly Twitter), and other websites.

It’s unclear if these outages are related, separate issues, or incorrect user reports. Cloudflare did identify an issue this morning, too, so it’s possible all of these outages are related to that. Cloudflare says it began implementing a fix shortly after 11 a.m. ET, so we’ll keep an eye out to see if Facebook, Instagram, and other sites start acting normally soon.

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Joe Maring
Section Editor, Mobile
Joe Maring is the Section Editor for Digital Trends' Mobile team, leading the site's coverage for all things smartphones…
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